I don’t live in the liveliest part of New York City. The Upper West Side, in fact, is known as one of the quieter neighborhoods in Manhattan. That being said, under normal conditions, I semi-regularly wake up to car horns or the emphatic reaction of a taxi driver to a UPS van parked too far out in the road. Lately though, I’ve been waking up to the sound of birds chirping and not much else. I could have mistaken it for nearly any sleepy street in the Grandest of Duchies, where waking to the sounds of birds was the norm unless you lived along one of the trans-frontalière veins like Route de Longwy – thank you Belgium.
COVID-19 hit New York hard, with titles such as “global epicenter” being plastered on TV and across every social media platform for weeks (even months). Initially the city took a varied response. The residents here are known for their indignant attitude to being told anything less than “come on in, the store is open” at any hour of the day. Gradually though, the city went to sleep. By the 22nd of March, the new norm was a daily televised briefing by both the mayor and governor along with a lot of anxious silence and empty streets. Lines at the grocery stores, flattening the curve, and social distancing became our standard of life like most of the world.
If you didn’t know better though, you’d simply think everyone had taken an extended holiday, turned off the lights, and locked the door on the way out. With the exception of a few places like Central Park and the daily 19h collective “cheer” the city puts on for the health workers, the streets have mostly remained empty while those in blue collar professions wait for permission to “get back to work” and those in the while collar sectors eke out billable hours or try to close deals as best they can from their living rooms. Companies like Ernst & Young, where I work, took a rapid response and anticipated the statewide shutdown by a week, sending us all home on 16 March for an indefinite amount of time. The larger companies were equipped to do this with work-from-home as an option much of the time anyways, though now it is absolutely required. It’s expected that most in the Big 4 and other major finance-focused companies won’t be physically back in the office in any major form until September though it remains to be seen if some mismanagement by a State government, carelessness on the part of locals, or some other factor causes a “second wave.” For the most part, the decision to “open up” rests on state governments due in part to politics, but also to the far from homogenous nature of the federation. The experience of friends in the rural Midwest where I grew up is starkly different from any coast or metropolis. “Why can’t we go to work?”, they ask from regions where COVID-19 is all but a myth, while in the same moment I sit in my living room getting the daily death toll of the 5 boroughs surrounding me 10 kilometers in any direction.
For expats like Eric Fort, a partner at the New York office of the Luxembourg law firm Arendt & Medernach, the workload has luckily not decreased, though he admits that he sees an increasing number of files where companies are facing financial issues. On a personal note though, he said, “I must admit that during the lockdown the time went so quickly as in normal time. Of course, the fact that I am busy helps. The fact that we can’t meet friends, go to restaurants, to the movie theater, to concerts or to travel is the most difficult part, but a nice dinner at home with Christine, or a picnic with friends in the Central Park (while observing the social distancing) and discussing the latest Netflix series has been a very nice compensation.” Eric’s youngest daughter, who attends university in Brussels, had a much different experience though. In fact, “[She] went to a friends’ in Flanders (she has no other family members in Luxembourg) […and was…] chased out of Flanders by the local police and landed finally in Cologne hosted by other friends after a three days odyssey through Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. She is still in Cologne and risks to be adopted by the family.”
At the moment, the parks tend to crowd on any given sunny spring day and people like Stephan Wagner of PwC Luxembourg have kept up with their regular running regimen, doing the New York and Brooklyn half marathons “virtually” by running solo instead of en masse as in the past. That being said, I have found there is a very real nervousness among all people with the occasional heckling at those not wearing a mask or at least darting glances in their direction. In the early part of the quarantine, I had taken my mask off while on the way back from Whole Foods (fully social distancing on 4 meter wide sidewalks, I would like to add) and an elderly woman stopped and asked me to wear a mask so she doesn’t die. These types of interventions by strangers are common now, even if the only thing preventing jarring comments like this is a flimsy mask made of rubber bands and an old t-shirt. However, late at night, as Nicolas Fermaud of the law firm Elvinger commented, the streets are “literally empty” and reminiscent of a calm evening stroll in Belair. This is far from “business as usual” for New York City.
Business in the broader sense (from my living room and extra computer monitor EY so kindly provided) started to kick into gear towards the end of May but we all hope with bated breath that the reopening of the more rural, less internationally exposed portions of the US won’t send us into another economic tailspin and make this recession into a so-called “W” shape. The local Luxembourg business community has certainly been alive and well, picking up on the new trend with periodic networking opportunities from the Luxembourg American Chamber of Commerce via Zoom and timely discussions of weathering the pandemic from a mental health perspective.
For now though, New York is taking a little nap while we all wait anxiously for it to wake up and rev back into the sleepless business metropolis we know and love. But it’s not all bad – it just feels a bit more like Luxembourg as this American international financial center and nature interact a bit more than usual.
The USNS Comfort ship coming up the Hudson River to assist with hospital overflow early in the quarantine. (Photo Jake Heyka)
Central Park on a typical sunny day. (Photo Jake Heyka)
An empty street on an evening walk that would normally still be very busy. (Photo Jake Heyka)
Jake Heyka is a Senior Associate in the International Tax and Transaction Services group at Ernst & Young. He also serves on the Luxembourg American Chamber of Commerce (LACC) Young Executives Committee and is the liaison between AmCham Luxembourg and the LACC.